The videos of her recipes are incredibly successful, so much so that Benedetta Rossi enters the kitchens of millions of Italians. His numbers are impressive: on Facebook he has almost 8 million and 400 thousand followers, on Instagram 5 million and 400 thousand, on his YouTube channel 3 million and 430,000 subscribers. She is the author of ten recipe books published by Mondadori, all bestsellers, and can also be seen on TV on Food Network with the program Homemade for you. In this interview from a few years ago published on Christian family she told us how she had been passionate about cooking since she was little and the secret of her relationship with the public, including children.
Why are you food bloggers and not chefs?
«Chefs are much better trained than me, I didn’t study, I learned on the job. From grandmothers and aunts. Ours is a peasant tradition. They were the classic housewives of the past who brought something good to the table with just a few ingredients. And that’s exactly what I try to do, using simple foods that everyone has available.»
The family recipes, however, are long gone.
«That yes, but since I’m creative I like to invent. I worked for many years on the family farm and this teaches the art of making do, for example to accommodate around forty diners when perhaps only twenty had booked.»
Did you try your hand at cooking since you were little?
«I was a very curious child and I was fascinated by the transformation of ingredients. For example, when I saw gnocchi being prepared with mashed potatoes, I went to the garden, took some soil and played at being a cook. Then, seeing my aptitude, they took me into the kitchen and already at three and a half years old Aunt Giulietta was making me dip pancakes in oil.»
When did you decide that cooking was your life?
«It wasn’t a real decision. I found myself almost by chance in a game bigger than me. I uploaded the first video on YouTube in 2009 to the family farm channel, for use by customers who asked me for the recipes. Many of those videos, which were small tutorials, exceeded 100 thousand views and this amazed me. A few years later, when I left the family farm and opened my own, I inaugurated a new channel with recipes for first courses, desserts and second courses, and from 2016 onwards there was great growth. My first recipe book with Mondadori was also published that year.»
Are there any dishes you like to cook?
«Sweets give me great satisfaction, they allow me to express my creativity and I enjoy them more. I also really like making leavened products such as savory brioche bread. Among the ingredients I use pumpkin a lot, which lends itself to a thousand preparations: baked, in risottos, for focaccias. So far I have prepared 700 recipes.»
How does your day as a food blogger go?
«It’s a very busy day, always responding to the messages and comments I receive. I want to maintain a good relationship with my followers, also because I try to propose recipes based on their requests. Together with my husband Marco we prepare two or three videos a week; I try the recipes several times first, so that they are error-proof. When I’m satisfied with the recipe, we turn.”
What relationship do you have with your followers?
«When I had meetings to present my books, the people who came to listen to me really needed to hug me and thank me, because perhaps in some particular moments I had been a comfort to them. What I receive from them is much more than what I give.»
What do you recommend to people who don’t feel too keen on cooking?
«We need to approach the kitchen lightly and forgive ourselves for any mistakes. We don’t have to worry about the judgment of others: we learn by making mistakes.”
He also recently made a video with the 44 Cats, Rainbow’s cartoon characters, preparing his personal recipe for Grandma Pina’s Tagliatelle.
«I realized that I am followed a lot by children, I receive many videos of them trying their hand at recipes. If you start from a young age you will never lose your enthusiasm for cooking. So when Rainbow proposed this video to me, I felt very honored and it was really fun.”
